Papers in the Biological Sciences

 

Title

Review of Dispersal. Based on a conference held in Roscoff, France, 23 April–1 May 1999.

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

September 2002

Comments

Published in The Quarterly Review of Biology 77:3 (September 2002), pp. 343-344. Copyright 2002 The University of Chicago. Used by permission.

Abstract

Edited by Jean Clobert, Etienne Danchin, André A Dhondt, and James D Nichols. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Dispersal is a phenomenon of central importance in ecology and evolution. Yet many of its fundamental aspects remain poorly understood or barely investigated. This excellent, broad-ranging volume is a collection of 26 short reviews derived from a Centre National de la Recherche (CNRS)-National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored workshop held in 1999. As stated by the editors, this book is mainly comprised of “reviews and more theoretical approaches, with a limited number of empirical examples” (p. xx) on dispersal.

I highly recommend this book. It will be particularly useful for researchers who want to get succinct updates on recent advances, state-of-the-art, and future directions of dispersal studies. This volume would also be ideal as a focus for a graduate course on dispersal.